Philips ASIC designed for 'Pegasus'

Electronic News, March 7, 1994 by Reinhardt Krause

SUNNYVALE, CALIF.--Philips Semiconductors last week introduced a video capture ASIC designed around the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus developed for Intel's "Pegasus" project.

The SAA7116 from Philips serves as an interface between video decoders and the PCI bus; with the device, add-in boards with compression/decompression processors can be bypassed. The PCI Special Interest Group plans this week to demonstrate Intel's Pegasus project, which leverages Intel's software-based Indeo video technology, Philip's ASIC, the Pentium processor and the 32-bit wide PCI bus.

Mike Bailey, Intel's PC marketing manager and chairman of the PCI SIG sterring committee--said "With PCI you can use a hardware codec or in the case of the demo we are showing a software codec where the Pentium is doing both the compression and playing it back and doing the decompression."

Intel's Indeo video software currently requires its i750 video processor; earlier this year, Intel rolled out its ProShare 200 videoconferencing system. The ProShare Video System 200 required a two-board set; a video board based on Intel's i750 video processor and a telephony board.

Mr. Bailey said Pegasus was Intel's internal name for the technology demonstration, adding that it was not itended to be a product demonstration. He said Intel's Architecture Development Labs developed the "Pegasus card," which contains Philips' ASIC, to demonstrate the PCI bus, capabilities. Intel's Architecture Labs also developed the Indeo video technology, however.

Mr. Bailey added that although multimedia applications such as videoconferencing could be performed with the Pentium and Indeo codec technology alone, there still might be cases in which "You use separate codec coprocessors. The bandwidth is still limited using the Pentium but we just want to show you can do that application using PCI." PCI, in burst mode, has a 132MB/sec available bandwidth but generally runs between 80-90MB/sec with wait states and addressing.

Still Intel could be setting the stage for further product introductions based on follow-on processors to the Pentium. While the Indeo technology provides real time video playback, its performance has been related to microprocessor speed.

In addition, though, the Indeo technology is impacted by playback window size and frame rate. Philips' video capture ASIC contains FIFOs to decouple the real time video data stream from the PCI bus and provides DMA channels to deliver the video data in packed format for local display, and in planar format for compression. As a result, the SAA7116 supports real time live video display from any analog video source directly onto the graphics monitor.

"The SAA7116 is a key element in Philips' ability to satisfy the demands of the desktop video market," said Steve Solari, director of marketing, media products group. "First generation TV-on-PC products kept the video on the add-in board because of bandwidth limitations of the ISA bus.

"With the SAA7116 and the throughput capacity of PCI, video can now stream onto the PCI specification is fairly simple, when you put data onto the PCI bus you have to tell it where to get off, which requires understanding of the complete system."

The SAA7116, which provides multistandard video input capability for PAL, NTSC and SECAM, is both a PCI bus master and slave. It operates in master mode to transfer video across the PCI bus and operates in slave mode to program local registers.

Philips said that during active capturing of video data, the master PCI state machine will request the bus once image data has been received and an address has been generated. The device generates burst writes of video data onto the PCI bus to frame buffer memory or system memory as specified by the DMA channels. There are six DMA address registers.

The device will also be offered to the OEM market by Philips in a 160-pin quad flat pack. Philips' SAA7116 is currently sampling; priced at $30 per unit, and is expected to be available in quantity in June.

Philips said future applications for the SAA7116 include video directly from the PCI bus onto a LAN and "the ability to create, manipulate and distribute video images in real time to a number of different nodes on a network."

With the new device, Philips is leveraging its expertise in PC and video technology. The company has supplied semiconductors to Hauppauge Computer, Hauppauge, N.Y., for its Win/TV card.